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  • From: Nicholas Roberts <nicholas@themediasociety.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, permacultue discussion list <pil-pc-oceania@lists.permacultureinternational.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] The Growing Clout of the Nouveau Poor
  • Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:46:11 +1100

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/ehrenreich/print
The Growing Clout of the Nouveau Poor
Comment
By Barbara Ehrenreich

January 12, 2009

Ever on the lookout for the bright side of hard times, I am tempted to
delete "class inequality" from my worry list. Less than a year ago, it
was the one of the biggest economic threats on the horizon, with even
hard-line conservative pundits grousing that wealth was flowing uphill
at an alarming rate, leaving the middle class stuck with stagnating
incomes while the new super-rich ascended to the heavens in their
personal jets. Then the whole top-heavy structure of American
capitalism began to totter, and--poof!--inequality all but vanished
from the public discourse. A financial columnist in the Chicago Sun
Times has just announced that the recession is a "great leveler,"
serving to "democratize[d] the agony," as we all tumble into "the
Nouveau Poor..."

The media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the
neo-suffering of the nouveau poor, or at least the formerly super-rich
among them. Foreclosures in Greenwich, Connecticut! A collapsing
market for cosmetic surgery! Sales of Gulfstream jets declining!
Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue on the ropes! We read of desperate
measures, like having to cut back the personal trainer to two hours a
week. Parties have been canceled; dinner guests have been offered,
gasp, baked potatoes and chili. The New York Times relates the story
of a New Jersey teenager whose parents were forced to cut her $100 a
week allowance and private Pilates classes. In one of the most
pathetic tales of all, New Yorker Alexandra Penney relates how she
lost her life savings to Bernie Madoff and is now faced with having to
lay off her three-day-a-week maid, Yolanda. "I wear a classic clean
white shirt every day of the week. I have about 40 white shirts. They
make me feel fresh and ready to face whatever battles I may be
fighting..." she wrote, but without Yolanda, "How am I going to iron
those shirts so I can still feel like a poor civilized person?"

But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than
Obama's inauguration is likely to eradicate racism. No one actually
knows yet whether inequality has increased or decreased during the
last year of recession, but the historical precedents are not
promising. The economists I've talked to-- like Biden's top economic
advisor, Jared Bernstein--insist that recessions are particularly
unkind to the poor and the middle class. Canadian economist Armine
Yalnizyan says, "Income polarization always gets worse during
recessions." It makes sense. If the stock market has shrunk your
assets of $500 million to a mere $250 million, you may have to pass on
a third or fourth vacation home. But if you've just lost an $8-an-hour
job, you're looking at no home at all.

All right, I'm a journalist and I understand how the media work. When
a millionaire cuts back on his crême fraîche and caviar consumption,
you have a touching human interest story. But pitch a story about a
laid-off roofer who loses his trailer home, and you're likely to get a
big editorial yawn. "Poor Get Poorer" is just not an eye-grabbing
headline, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Food stamp
applications, for example, are rising toward a historic record; calls
to one DC-area hunger hotline have jumped 248 percent in the last six
months, most of them from people who have never needed food aid
before. And for the first time since 1996, there's been a marked
upswing in the number of people seeking cash assistance from TANF (
Temporary Aid to Needy Families), the exsanguinated version of welfare
left by welfare "reform." Too bad for them that TANF is essentially a
wage-supplement program based on the assumption that the poor would
always be able to find jobs, and that it pays, at most, less than half
the federal poverty level.

Why do the sufferings of the poor and the downwardly mobile class
matter more than the tiny deprivations of the rich? Leaving aside all
the soft-hearted socialist, Christian-type, arguments, it's because
poverty and the squeeze on the middle class are a big part of what got
us into this mess in the first place. Only one thing kept the sub-rich
spending in the '00s, and hence kept the economy going, and that was
debt: credit card debt, home equity loans, car loans, college loans
and of course the now famously "toxic" subprime mortgages, which were
bundled and sliced into "securities" and marketed to the rich as
high-interest investments throughout the world. The gross inequality
of American society wasn't just unfair or aesthetically displeasing;
it created a perilously unstable situation.

Which is why any serious government attempt to get the economy going
again--and I leave aside the unserious attempts like bank bailouts and
other corporate welfare projects--has to start at the bottom. Obama is
promising to generate 3 million new jobs in "shovel-ready" projects,
and let's hope they're not all jobs for young men with strong backs.
Until those jobs kick in, and in case they leave out the elderly, the
single moms and the downsized desk-workers, we're going to need an
economic policy centered on the poor: more money for food stamps, for
Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and, yes, cash assistance along the
lines of what welfare once was, so that when people come tumbling down
they don't end up six feet under. For those who think "welfare" sounds
too radical, we could just call it a "right to life" program, only one
in which the objects of concern have already been born.

If that sounds politically unfeasible, consider this: When Clinton was
cutting welfare and food stamps in the 90s, the poor were still an
easily marginalized group, subjected to the nastiest sorts of racial
and gender stereotyping. They were lazy, promiscuous, addicted
deadbeats, as whole choruses of conservative experts announced. Thanks
to the recession, however--and I knew there had to be a bright
side--the ranks of the poor are swelling every day with failed
business owners, office workers, salespeople and long-time homeowners.
Stereotype that! As the poor and the formerly middle-class nouveau
poor become the American majority, they will finally have the clout to
get their needs met.

* Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
* If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.

About Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the
winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. more...



--
--
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor



  • [permaculture] The Growing Clout of the Nouveau Poor, Nicholas Roberts, 01/13/2009

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